Jordi Alcaraz’s deeply emotional and
cerebral show, Deixants I Portes (Wakes
and Doors), featured nearly two dozen
paintings and a few sculptures. The Catalan
artist uses simple, inexpensive materials
and builds his own heavy wooden
frames. Tearing, gouging, and burning
through the thin paper and cardboard of
his booklike assemblages, Alcaraz reveals
each layer as a way of producing “drawings.”
His enigmatic markings are made
with ink, glass, staples, and bits of wire,
effectively challenging the viewer to
write the story. Alcaraz manipulates the
glass or acrylic he uses to protect each
piece, adding shadows, lines, and an unexpected
depth.Llibre D’astronomía (II), 2012, is a tattered book, crudely bound with butcher’s
string. Its pages, all lacking text, are
marked with large pools of black paint
that form a constellation of sorts. But the
acrylic covering has been melted inward,
making these “stars” look more like black
holes in space.
Alcaraz introduces an additional dimension
to his sculptures by engaging
the acrylic of the vitrines that contain
them. A molded paraffin headlike shape
in Somiar (Dream), 2012, pushes against
the side of the vitrine, as if trying to escape
from a nightmare. It’s a subtle, yet
arresting, gesture.
One of the more minimal works in the
show was Procés Per Fixar Idees (I),
2012. The book’s images are composed
of bits of broken acrylic, stapled to its
pages or affixed with wire. One illegible
word, written in soft pencil, is the only
text in evidence. The book appears to
have exploded in a violent way, spitting
out bits of broken acrylic and staples,
suggesting a possible story line yet to be
written. It clearly reflects Alcaraz’s particularly
Catalan surrealist bent.
—Annette M. Rose-Shapiro

“Longhand” proves an apt title for Christopher Kurtz’s four-piece show at Tomlinson Kong Contemporary. On a formal level, Kurtz’s
sculptures suggest the lines and shapes of handwriting. Two of the pieces, "Litany" and "Act Together," resemble the baroque swirls of
cursive script made three-dimensional. The slender quills of the other two pieces, "Palace" and "The Gloaming," suggest a different graphic sensibility: neat and formal, yet still bearing the trace of the hand, these forms etch soft black lines in space to create volume and void.

And yet, "Longhand" suggests not only formal associations of handwriting but the manual, painstaking process by which these sculptures were made. Kurtz, who is also a furniture designer, is a master carpenter. Each of the hand-carved pieces exemplifies some particular aspect of his technical prowess: his ability to make wood curl and loop back around itself in improbable ways; to carve bass-wood into long, needle-thin spikes; to create invisible seams that join two pieces as if they had always been one. The sculptures in "Longhand" do not apologize for the evident labor and skill that they require, but nor do they belabor the point. Carpentry is in service to Kurtz’s art, but this is not art about carpentry...

Christopher Kurtz is a sculptor who works in wood. His work moves between natural winding branches and pointed stick-like forms. Either way, his approach to sculpture is a classical one. It contains a will to order, one that is less about power than balance. While Nietzsche may linger in the shadows, the articulation of proportions is more given to Chuang-Tzu. The content is only a matter of degree. A subtle tilt or bend in the wood will determine the work’s expressive potential. Kurtz’s sense of ordering is generally more spatial than formal. Whether thinly carved wooden spears shoot out from a central hub into the space around them or a large fallen branch becomes the readymade design for a winding linear form, Kurtz follows the course of his observations and thought. His work may recall three-dimensional asterisks, such as bursting planetary orbs, or it may suggest a ribbon-like estuary that flows until it becomes fixed in time like a meandering glacier. Regardless of his sources, the structure within each piece of work remains clear and incisive. The resolution is less about pre-determination than a process that engenders discovery...

Christopher Kurtz approaches sculpture with the meticulous dexterity of a trained craftsman. To create Litany, 2012, arguably the centerpiece of his first solo exhibition in New York, the artist routinely woke before daybreak to hand-carve maple, oak, and cedar into strips of wood, then gingerly pieced these together into a continuous beam that curves thirteen feet across the gallery and soars five feet toward the ceiling. In some places thick and heavy, in others nimbly slender, it swoops through the air, often branching into seamless, curling tendrils.

Litany is so delicate and so immaculate that it seems unbelievable the work was carved by hand. Kurtz has painted the sides of the beam a stark white and the top and bottom a coal black, which obscures the medium somewhat, causing the work to oscillate between what it is (wood, handcrafted) and what it seems (metal, machine-made). This dualism accentuates the capacity of wood to do things it often doesn’t do—twirl and spiral, pirouette and twist. It also highlights Kurtz’s process, notably the stunning levels of patience and attention required to make wood appear weightless.

What is significant about Litany, then—as opposed to some of the other works on view here, all impressive displays of technical prowess and execution—is the way Kurtz emphasizes the human quality of craftsmanship as a genre. Is it pitifully romantic to think the human hand may imbue an aesthetic object with a certain set of qualities that a machine cannot? Perhaps. What is certain, however, is that it is precisely the illusory choice of paint as well as the play of dimension that unravels these questions, pushing Litany firmly out of the realm of craft.

Much contemporary art floating around galleries these days couples aesthetic purity (e.g., the Minimalism of Dan Flavin) with nose-thumbing at a particular medium (e.g., John Baldessari's riffs on photography). This combo plate is exactly what Mr. Girardoni (b. 1967) offers up in an exhibition that's somehow much better in overall "feel" than in its irritatingly familiar parts.

The Baldessari-esque section consists of large color C-prints of the backs of billboards in the desert, a New York City street with construction scaffolding, and a gritty Los Angeles parking lot. They're mounted on aluminum and elegantly defaced with buttered-on rectangles of paint. They look, in a word, good. The Flavinlike component is made up of long cast-resin bars, backlighted in purple, that lean or lie around in a separate room. These are pretty nice, too. If it weren't for the faint, sci-fi music (an increasingly obligatory "sound" element in exhibitions), "Lost-and-Found" would totally transcend some of its arguable particulars and be a really convincing show.